Dominique Morisseau grew up in the city of Detroit. From a young age, she had an inclination for the arts. One of her most powerful gifts was her ear for listening to the sounds of her city. The Detroit Project is a three-play cycle of plays set in Detroit across its history and includes the plays Detroit ’67; set among siblings trying to run a Motown club during the 1967 riots / uprisings; Skeleton Crew, set during the 2008 Great Recession as the workers at an auto plant face a shuttering industry; and Paradise Blue, set in another moment of promise and turmoil.
Paradise Blue premiered the summer of 2015 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. The play is set in 1949 in Detroit’s former neighborhood of Black Bottom, a flourishing Black neighborhood from the 1920s-1950s. Paradise Valley was the Black entertainment center just to the north of Black Bottom, featuring Black-owned businesses, thriving culture, and a strong-knit community. Paradise Valley was a thriving entertainment hub, featuring the most popular entertainers in blues and big band jazz performers including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, and Louis Armstrong. With the prospering music venues, development of local record labels, and renowned musical artists finding homes in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, Detroit was becoming a pivotal city for its lively and influential music scene.
Beginning in 1946, the federal government and Detroit-area developers demolished Black Bottom in the name of “urban renewal” and “slum clearance,” replacing the Black-owned homes, clubs, and businesses of the neighborhoods with Interstate-375 (I-375) in the mid-1950s. By the 1970s, urban renewal had made its mark; the Detroit Commission on Community Relations calculated that 10,000 structures were demolished and 43,000 people (70% of whom were Black) were displaced by urban renewal in Detroit.
Morisseau sets Paradise Blue just as these forces are coming into view, taking up the musicians’ perspective on their community, their music, and their legacy. The play follows Blue, a top-notch trumpeter and owner of the Paradise Club. As the businesses in Black Bottom are at risk of being bought up in a bid from the city to reclaim valuable real estate from Black owners, Blue’s house band, Corn and P-Sam, and his wife, Pumpkin, grapple with their inevitably changing environment. The Paradise Club is one of the original jazz spots in Paradise Valley; it’s also their home. When a mysterious woman, Silver, comes to town, she sees these dynamics with an outsider’s eyes, understanding the value of the club and the importance of keeping it in the hands of someone who values it for what it is. P-Sam, who has his own hopes for the club, says, “One sell out and it weaken the whole bunch. Unless ’steada sellin’ to them, we sell to us.”
While Corn, P-Sam, and Pumpkin resist the gentrification and the erasure of their community, Blue contemplates selling his jazz club to the city. Paradise Club was an inheritance from his troubled and abusive father. The club serves as a constant, painful reminder of past trauma, and Blue is hounded by the same demons that lead to his father’s undoing and his mother’s death. As a musician, he’s always searching for what Corn calls “Love Supreme,”—“that perfect note that cleans your sins.” John Coltraine wouldn’t release A Love Supreme until 1965, but here Morisseau claims Coltraine’s masterwork of musicality and spirituality as a theme for the gifted, violent, traumatized trumpeter Blue.
Ultimately, Morisseau troubles the idea of a singular genius cleansed of all trauma in a moment of transcendence. Blue’s real problem, as Corn points out, is that Blue “wanna be mighty but the world keep him small. Cost of bein’ colored and gifted…. Make you insane.” As Morisseau has said, “it’s important to me that there’s an understanding of the heart and soul and frustration that goes into Black musicians who are trying to exist in a racist time—in an overtly racist time—and how that can sometimes eat those musicians and those artists alive.”
Through the Black female-identifying characters of the play, Morisseau explores Black women finding their power in a patriarchal environment, whether it’s the newcomer Silver’s relationship to her past or her unapologetic fight for the things she desires. In the character of Pumpkin, Morisseau shows a kind-spirited character who is treated poorly by others at times. She is the character who sees Paradise Valley for all that it has—a community who can take care of each other, a place she came as a young woman that showed her Black people in their self-sufficient glory, making a world of abundance within the racist limitations of segregated Michigan.
Paradise Blue warns of the long-lasting pain that is caused by gentrification, which can tear communities apart through internal conflict and displacement. Morisseau's plays writ large serve as lessons in resilience and give voice to those from marginalized backgrounds who have been silenced and ostracized by society. Morisseau continues to use her art as a form of activism by keeping the stories of her hometown alive.
—Niara Richards